COLOMBIA: Deadly Cargo

Breaking the 430-mile journey from the port of Buenaventura to Bogotá, six government trucks braked to a stop one afternoon last week beside the old Pacific railroad station in Cali, the palm-shaded heart city of the rich Cauca River Valley. In a district jammed with factories, warehouses and slums, the drivers bedded down for the night with their cargo—more than 30 tons of high explosives. At 1:07 a.m., like 30 blockbusters, the cargo blew up, in a tower of red flame and seething of black smoke.

More than a mile from the station, panes of glass vanished from their frames, doors were ripped from their hinges, a movie theater collapsed. Within an hour, rescue teams of priests, Boy Scouts and taxi drivers were digging into the wreckage. Said one driver, jolted from his bed by the blast: "People were running through what was left of the streets in their underwear. I saw ten members of a family lying dead in a row."

At smoky dawn, three square miles of tragedy could be seen. Where the trucks had stood, nothing remained but a crater, 190 ft. across and 30 ft. deep. The old station, converted to a barracks, was gone; of the 320 soldiers who had been sleeping inside, all had disappeared but two. In the warm days that followed, bodies hidden beneath the tumbled walls began to decompose. To avoid disease, the dead were rushed through a makeshift morgue in the soccer stadium, buried in mass graves. After three days of searching, the number of bodies recovered stood at close to 500. But many hundreds of others who were in the area where blast force reached the disintegration point were missing and presumably dead, and 2,000 were injured.

When the first shock of disaster had worn off, bitter questions arose. What was in the trucks? Public Works Department dynamite, said the government. How was the explosion set off? President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla blamed "political saboteurs." Why were six trucks, loaded with so deadly a cargo, allowed to spend the night in a crowded city? That was a question Cali would never stop asking.